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Paranoia a-plenty

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Bio-weapons expert Dr Stephen Hatfill (pictured) has been - according to the FBI - a “person of interest”. He’s certainly an interesting person with an interesting history. A federal court this week stopped his efforts to dispute his status as a person of public interest - the legal label is “a public figure”.

Consequently he can no longer prevent a public entity, a newspaper, from discussing his place in the FBI’s probe into the rash of anthrax mailings which killed five people in 2001 and made 13 others ill.

The New York Times won a motion to dismiss a defamation suit by Dr Hatfill against the paper. It was Times columnist Nicholas Kristof who had referred to the doctor, under the cover name of Mr Z, back in mid-2002 as the primary focus of the FBI’s attention. In August that year Dr Hatfill came out and identified himself as Mr Z, claiming he was being defamed in the media. He had been a scientist at the US Army bio-weapons laboratories in Fort Detrick, Maryland, and long before that was a reputed member of white-led security forces in southern Africa. (More of this later.)

His complaint was disputed by the Times on the grounds – so often used in American journalism when defamation or libel accusations are being thrown around – that Dr Hatfill was obviously a public figure and thus open to public scrutiny and fair comment. He had placed himself, after all, firmly in the realm of public debate by raising urgent questions about this country’s preparedness for chemical and biological attacks. In contributions to the right-wing Washington Times and Insight magazine he had persistently argued that the US is appallingly vulnerable to bio-terrorism.

It should be recorded clearly that no-one has been charged with any crime in the anthrax-mailing case, and over five years later it remains unsolved.

One of the oddities of the story is that Dr Hatfill’s own resume has placed him in what is now Zimbabwe during the 1970s, still under white rule then, and even though even though there’s no official record of him, he has claimed combat experience with a crack unit (and a notoriously brutal force) of the time, the SAS (Special Air Service). What is clear is that he gained a medical degree at the university of what is now Harare, and later he relocated to South Africa for his clinical internship and residency. He stayed there to earn, over a decade, three master's degrees – in microbial genetics and recombinant DNA, medical biochemistry and radiation biology, and hematological pathology.

It’s worth pointing out that what Dr Hatfill’s supporters say was his “media hounding” out of the research job he had at Fort Detrick came after his name had been linked with the anthrax investigation, but it was actually a direct result of answers he gave during a polygraph test. The flag-raising readings during his lie-detector session - which Hatfill has scornfully dismissed as being conducted by polygraph "amateurs" - spiked in specific response to questions about his time in Africa.

The tussle between Dr Hatfill and the media has been long and complicated; the judge in the case has thrown out his legal efforts once before. Now Justice Claude Hilton of the 4^th Circuit Court in Virginia is to give (presumably more closely argued) reasons for this latest judgment within a day or so.

I don’t for a moment expect that will be the end of the story.



MEANWHILE, IN OTHER WASHINGTON AREA LAWCOURTS ACTION, Vice President Dick Cheney’s trusted chief-of-staff “Scooter” Libby has finally come to trial. He faces up to 30 years in prison if found guilty of perjury and obstructing investigators into the leaking of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s name and role.

Oddly, perhaps, Libby may be a very different character from Dr Hatfill, but they shared a powerful conviction, bordering on an obsessive preoccupation, that the nation was ill-prepared for a biological attack. Well, maybe in Libby’s case it was just a matter of faithful megaphoning for his master. Both he and the Vice President agitated strongly, against the prevailing doubt among more practical thinkers among the Administration, for widespread (even perhaps nationwide) inoculation of Americans against smallpox. They held a December 2002 tactical meeting with other staffers on the subject in the Veep’s Old Naval Observatory mansion.

Through some mysterious process that we can only assume was no accident, a New York Times story by Libby’s (and other officials’) favorite leakee, Judith Miller, appeared just days before this meeting under the headline C.I.A. HUNTS IRAQ TIE TO SOVIET SMALLPOX.

It seems so long ago now, but such was the willing press paranoia that helped take us to war, three short months after that Washington huddle of hyper-vigilantes.